(The Nationalist, September 2004)
About twenty-five years ago, I spent a few days in Egypt. I did the tourist thing, visiting the pyramids and the Sphinx at Giza, and then went south to Luxor and Karnak, to the valleys of the kings and the queens. The weather was hot and dry. A local man was selling ice-cream and cold drinks, but, for whatever reason, the line of tourists walked past him. No one bought anything, and, it seems, no one made eye contact with him either. Suddenly he shouted, ‘Look at me! I am a man!’ He woke us up. He wasn’t asking us to buy anything; he didn’t beg or plead or wheedle. He simply demanded to be treated with the respect due to a human being. He was right.
What’s the opposite of love? The immediate, obvious answer is ‘hatred’. But is it really? Is it not true to say that hatred is love which has turned sick and sour, but which can be healed and made whole again? The opposite of love is indifference, to ignore people, to take them for granted, to fail to treat them as persons. That is more difficult to heal, because it is usually unaware that it is in need of healing.
My image of indifference is of a shrug of the shoulders and a dismissive ‘I don’t care…’ (Sometimes we say, ‘I don’t care what you do; you can do what you like’, as if, in saying so, we showed respect for the other’s freedom of choice. But often it simply and literally means, ‘I don’t care’, full stop. That is saying that the other person does not matter to us. Can a human being ever say that, with respect, about another?)
But indifference sometimes goes deeper than ignoring others. It may be that we are so self-absorbed that it just doesn’t enter our head to be aware of the other in the first place. We don’t notice because we have eyes for no one but ourselves.
The basic moral question which every person has to answer is, ‘Why should I care about anyone but myself?’ Is there anyone whose needs I do in fact put before my own? To fail to recognize and to respect the humanity of the other person is the basic sin. (See Matthew 25.31-46) In the end we will be judged on how we have loved.